A Year of Biblical Womanhood: A Review

There are several reasons why I decided to read and review Rachel Held Evans’ forthcoming book A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband "Master" (Thomas Nelson; October 30, 2012).

I certainly am not writing this review out of any sense of convenience and comfort. Here’s why I did:

First, as a Christian woman who adheres to Reformed doctrine, I believe the Bible to be the inerrant word of God, written by men, inspired by God, infallible in all that it teaches, sufficient for all of life and doctrine, and the very words of God, words from God. And this new book from Evans is a recent example of how this essential truth is lost.

Second, I write this review because I have something of a relational history with the author. I have had the pleasure of corresponding with her over emails and have enjoyed our brief interactions.

Third, and even more centrally, I write this review out of a love for my fellow sisters in the church who are trying to walk with integrity as women, as I am, before God.

Finally, I write this review out of a love for the lost who are searching for answers about God and the Bible and will read this book and sadly be misled.

Before I begin the review, let me say that I find this book to be most troubling because of Evans’ handling of Scripture. As much as I hoped to be pleasantly surprised, as I read my heart became heavy. And yet, for all its weaknesses, this book is sure to draw a lot of attention in the coming weeks.

Evans embarked on a yearlong mission to explore the Scripture references to women, following and practicing what they say as literally as possible. Her adventures take her through various Jewish traditions, she interviews polygamists, she camps outside, she spends the night in a monastery.

Each month, for one year, she tackled a new challenge or virtue such as gentleness, domesticity, obedience, and submission. At the end of each chapter, she features a specific woman in the Bible writing out a historical profile and her thoughts.

She interviews a wide range of people from a variety of faiths and traditions. Her book does not draw from purely an evangelical, or even distinctly Christian, perspective. Many of her rituals are from the Jewish tradition, and she quotes several Rabbis.

As I read the book, it became increasingly clear to me of one theme: God’s word was on trial. It was the court of Rachel Held Evans. She was the prosecution, judge, and jury. The verdict was out. And with authority and confidence, she would have the final word on womanhood.

Evans makes it clear that although she holds the Bible in high esteem as a historical document, she would warn us to be careful in attempting to use it as a guide for living out the Christian faith. A few quotes explain her stance.

Despite what some may claim, the Bible’s not the best place to look for traditional family values as we understand them today. (48)

I kept digging, and as it turns out, Peter and Paul were putting a Christian spin on what their readers would have immediately recognized as the popular Greco-Roman “household codes.” (216)

Evans also quotes Sharyn Dowd saying, “The apostles advocated this system not because God had revealed it as the divine will for Christian homes, but because it was the only stable and respectable system anyone knew about. It was the best the culture had to offer” (217).

The Bible is a sacred collection of letters and laws, poetry and proverbs, philosophy and prophecies, written and assembled over thousands of years in cultures and contexts very different from our own, that tells the complex, ever-unfolding story of God’s interaction with humanity. (293)

And you see it most clearly in Evans' conclusion.

For those who count the Bible as sacred, the question when interpreting and applying the Bible to our lives is not, will we pick and choose? But rather how will we pick and choose? We are all selective in our reading of Scripture, and so the question we have to ask ourselves is this: Are we reading with the prejudice of love or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed? (295)

And later:

This is why there are times when the most instructive question to bring to the text is not, what does it say? But what am I looking for? I suspect Jesus knew this when he said, “ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” (295)

Throughout A Year of Biblical Womanhood, Evans works to prove that the Bible is not without error and therefore cannot be applied literally — and in some cases cannot be trusted (as we see by the implications of Paul’s and Peter’s motives, she says, to keep their culture in the Scriptures). Furthermore, the Scriptures are called sacred but never inspired by God, never the very words of God.

This notion is applied to every text, except in the chapter on justice where she unequivocally determines that God got it right: “Justice is one of the most consistent and clear teachings of Scripture, and traditionally, a crucial function of the Church” (228).

Evans selects various Old Testament laws regarding women and discusses the horror of such laws, yet she never rises to the place where the purpose of these laws are made sense of. And yet she never introduces the redemptive history of Scripture. This point could take up an entire lengthy blog post of its own. Evans will not allow redemptive history into her courtroom.

This is not to say that Evans is a poor writer. She’s talented, engaging, funny, and at times I found myself wrapped in her story, pretending to grip a walkie-talkie for her as she described sleeping alone in her tent in the front yard during her monthly cycle (see Leviticus 15:19–33). While the living-biblically-for-a-year theme is not original to her, she wrote this book quite creatively.

But while the book is engaging, her methods and her conclusions on womanhood are confusing at best. And this is largely because she selectively decides which Scriptures apply to women and which ones do not. She spoke with men and women from a full range of backgrounds and faiths and then attempted to apply them to evangelical Bible-believing Christianity. The majority of her quotes and references from complementarians aim to show complementarianism as foolish and dated. Strangely she more often cites authors with a more traditionalist orientation (and less truly complementarian) and only one or two of the more biblical moderates.

Evans claims to be caught between conservative and liberal theology. She believes in the physical resurrection of Christ, and she believes in evolution. But in seeking to bridge conservative and liberal theology in this book, she invests so much time explaining what she does not believe, that readers will be left wondering exactly what she does believe.

Part of this comes down to widely differing worldviews. To understand womanhood, Evans blends Eastern practices and mysticism, with a few selected Scripture quotes. For me to properly understand biblical womanhood, I can only finally return to God’s sufficient word, which is living and active and sharper than any double-edged sword (Hebrews 4:12). Our worldviews split over whether the Bible is inerrant and sufficient. And when the Bible is determined to be insufficient to guide our faith and life, or to define womanhood according to God’s design, the temptation is to run to various methods, various faiths, and to synchronize selected doctrines — which is precisely what Evans does in this book.

Through this book it seems Evans is trying to “reach” women like me, who take the Bible seriously and believe God is honored through his design for complementary roles in marriage and the church. But I fear she will actually have the greatest impact on those who are already sympathetic to her undermining of the truthfulness and sufficiency and relevance of the Bible, those who are already suspicious of Christianity, and who are already prone to deny that God has designed a special and beautiful role for women in marriage. This is a book that will reinforce the views of non-Christian men and women who seek validation for thinking Christians are foolish for following the Bible closely.

In this book Evans is trying to build a bridge, but I wonder if it is not rather a comfortable bridge for shaky evangelicals to find their way into theological liberalism. This book is not ultimately about manhood and womanhood, headship and submission, or the complementarian and egalitarian debate. At its root this book questions the validity of the Bible. And denying the inerrancy and sufficiency of Scripture is a denial that will ultimately erode the gospel of our Savior.

Beautiful Submission

It's easy to tell a woman to submit, or to tell a husband to love his wife as Christ loves the church, but it can be excruciating to live out. It's easy to throw these Bible verses around like the rock in David's sling hoping to knock down that Goliath of 'My Way.'

In a marriage, there's a lot of submission and a lot of loving that's supposed to be going on. But who wants to serve, who wants to sacrifice, who wants to lay down their life for another? Who wants to humble themselves for the good of another human?

The answer: Jesus Christ.

I remember when submission was first presented to me as something I must do in order to be obedient and godly. I kicked against it. Because it wasn’t taught to me through the gospel, all I could see was subjugation. I had all kinds of arguments to throw against it; you just couldn't talk to me about submission.

How can you talk to a person about submission when they don't have a good grasp of the Godhead and are hazy minded about who God is?

We can't fully comprehend the beauty of headship and submission until we have a sober understanding of who God is: the true God, the Triune God . . . Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

It is never wise to start with what is required of man. We must start with who God is, proceed to what he has done and only then can we coherently speak to what is required of us. It is at these junctures where we find out just how important it is for us all to understand the doctrine of the trinity.

What brought me to faithful submission to my husband was not a “how to be a better wife” book. It was an understanding of the person and cross work of Christ. It was the gospel being pressed into every corner of my being.

Romans 8:29 says, “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.” If I am to be conformed to the image of Christ I need to know what his characteristics are so that through abiding in him and walking in the Spirit I can approximate the image of Christ in this life. If I am to live in relationship to others, I need to know how Christ lives within the trinity and among men.

One of the things Christ says about himself is, “take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart” (Matthew 11:29). Paul writes in Philippians 2:5–8,

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Who is Christ? He is God the Son.

What is he like? Gentle, humble in heart, equal with God, in human form.

What did he do? He did not grasp for his equality but instead humbled himself to become obedient to the point of death on a cross.

Who was he obedient to? God the Father with whom he had, and has, equality.

How does this instruct me as I seek to live my life like Christ?

Kathy Keller says in The Meaning of Marriage, “Both women and men get to 'play the Jesus role' in marriage — Jesus in his sacrificial authority, Jesus in his sacrificial submission.”

As a wife I see my role in relationship to Christ in the words of the Apostle Paul: “I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God” (1 Corinthians 11:3).

As a woman I already have a Jesus role — the sacrificial gifting of my submission to my husband. Should I try to “grasp” for his “Jesus role?” Should I try to swap my Jesus role for his? To what end? If Jesus being equal with God did not grasp for his equality but instead submitted himself to the plan and will of the Father, should I as my husband's equal “grasp” for mine? How can that possibly transform me into the image of Christ?

To understand any of our roles we first have to understand the Godhead. Only then will any of this stuff make sense. Only then will it be shown that these roles are not cultural or social constructs but part of the warp and weft of objective reality.

 

Biblical Womanhood and the Problem of the Old Testament

As explained in my review of A Year of Biblical Womanhood, much of Rachel Held Evans’ book could be summed up, sadly, as an attempt to discount the validity of Scripture. I am hopeful that she does not intend for this to happen, but it is unfortunately what happens when she repeatedly speaks of the Bible as being outdated, useless in parts, and at times downright horrific — including at one point describing having a terrifying nightmare as she contemplated the texts (62). Tragically, that is her claim.

Evans is troubled by many things in the Old Testament, but especially by the harsh consequences in the law that follow from sexual sin — consequences that often required the death of men and women. In explaining why these same codes do not apply today — why adulterers are not stoned to death — she can only say, “Most Jews and Christians have long abandoned the practices associated with hard patriarchy” (51). But is it that simple — and that shallow?

She suggests this is because Jesus ignored certain Old Testament laws. He was a revolutionary who used “selective literalism” and who broke these anti-adultery laws when he urged compassion on the adulterous woman (53). But before we charge Jesus with breaking the law, we should give this question some serious thought.

Actually, we are faced with two questions. First, how should we handle the abuse of women recorded in the Old Testament? And second, how should we properly evaluate the ongoing value of the Old Testament law?

In one chapter, Evans sets out to find groups “committed to preserving as much of the patriarchal structure of Old Testament law as possible,” including polygamists. In polygamy, “the man’s consequent procreative prowess is listed by writers of Scripture as one of his most worthy virtues” (51, 58). That is a bold claim, but she provides no biblical citations to back it up.

In her thoughts on polygamy, Evans claims the Bible never condemns it. Yet monogamous marriage seems to be the norm in the Old Testament (Genesis 2:24, Malachi 2:13–15), and especially so in the New Testament (1 Timothy 3:12; Titus 1:6). Nowhere do we read the Bible sanctioning polygamy.

The abuse of women recorded in the Old Testament is one reason Evans reevaluated biblical womanhood and rejected complementary roles in marriage today. She notes that at one point she had confidence in the biblical view of submission. “When Dan and I got married back in 2003, we began our marriage with the assumption that I would submit to him because the Bible told me to, that while I had a voice in our decisions as a couple, Dan held the reins,” he writes. “Dan would bring home the bacon, and I would fry it” (204).

But during the early years of her marriage, Evans and her husband found that they needed to run two businesses, and as she put it “tasks tend to get assigned based on efficiency rather than gender” (204). As life continued to get busier, they realized that they functioned “best as a team of equal partners” (204). Why complementarian marriage cannot be defined as a team of equal partners (with differing roles), is not clear. In fact her chapter on submission (pages 201–220) leaves me with many unanswered questions. I’m sure other reviews will ask many of the same questions in the coming weeks.

Chillingly, Evans now claims that what she reads in the Bible is a nightmare of oppression for women. She calls upon Christian women to remember the dark stories.

Those who seek to glorify biblical womanhood have forgotten the dark stories. They have forgotten that the concubine of Bethlehem, the raped princess of David's house, the daughter of Jephthah, and the countless unnamed women who lived and died between the lines of Scripture exploited, neglected, ravaged, and crushed at the hand of patriarchy are as much a part of our shared narrative as Deborah, Esther, Rebekah, and Ruth. We may not have a ceremony through which to grieve them, but it is our responsibility as women of faith to guard the dark stories for our own daughters, and when they are old enough, to hold their faces between our hands and make them promise to remember. (66)

The sinful abuse of women in the Old Testament is troubling, but as troubling as it is, those sins are not determinative of new-covenant ethics for the church today, and they do not dismiss male headship either.

In writing this post, Tony Reinke passed along some helpful research suggestions as I processed what I was reading. On this point he sent the following quote from Margaret Köstenberger's book Jesus and the Feminists, where she writes:

It is true that the historical narrative books of the Hebrew Scriptures witness to numerous abuses of this abiding principle of male headship in the Old Testament period, such as arbitrary divorce (Deuteronomy 24:1–2), the intermittent practice of polygamy, adultery, rape, incest, and so on. Scripture does not condone these behaviors and attitudes. At the same time, the New Testament does not abrogate the principle of male headship even subsequent to redemption in Christ. Thus, Paul still can call Christian wives to submit to their husbands (Ephesians 5:22–24), and Peter similarly enjoins wives even of unbelieving husbands to submit to them (1 Peter 3:1–6). (34)

In fact, for all of her concerns about the Old Testament laws and polygamy and rape and abuse towards women in old-covenant times, Evans ultimately misses a fundamental truth. For Jesus and Paul and for the Church, sexual and marriage ethics (and biblical womanhood) are not based on the historical sins against women that are recorded in the Old Testament, but from the pre-fall monogamous union of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2. From reading Evans’ book, you would think this was not the case.

In the first marriage, in this pre-fall union, we find the norm for all human sexual ethics, for marriage, for male and female equality, and for the distinctives to biblical manhood and biblical womanhood. When Evans addresses Eve in particular (which is very early in the book, pages xx–xxii), she fails to notice that Eve was taken out of Adam and created, not to be a helper like him, but to be Adam’s perfectly adapted helper for him (Genesis 2:18, 1 Corinthians 11:8–10). By missing this foundational point — by missing the very genesis of biblical womanhood — the remainder of the book was certain to be unclear.

Which brings me to my second point. On top of polygamy, there is female slavery, the presence of concubines, death prescribed for sexual sins, separation from the community during a monthly cycle, widows forced to marry the brother of their late husbands, arranged marriages, pagan women slaughtered in battles, and so on (48–51). Without distinction, Evans blends what is prescribed in the law and what is described in narratives, making it all normative for “biblical womanhood.”

In her view, for womanhood to be considered biblical, everything in the Bible must be followed, what is prescribed and what is described. That isn’t possible, she says, therefore biblical womanhood is a myth (294). So we must select what we want to obey and what we don’t want to obey (a troubling theme of the book that I addressed in my original review).

Evans claims that this is what Jesus did, after all, when he refused to stone the adulterous woman (John 8:3–11). According to the law, adulterous women are to be stoned (Leviticus 20:10, Deuteronomy 22:22). Jesus refused to.

Evans writes:

Jesus once said that his mission was not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. And in this instance, fulfilling the law meant letting it go. It may serve as little comfort to those who have suffered abuse at the hand of Bible-wielding literalists, but the disturbing laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy lose just a bit of their potency when God himself breaks them. (54)

Evans’ language for why Jesus did not stone the adulterous woman is confusing and misleading.

Jesus is sinless (Hebrews 4:15). It’s doubtful that breaking the law would be the best way to describe it. Ignoring the uncomfortable parts of the law certainly does not seem accurate either. Jesus does not abolish the law, not one little comma in it (Matthew 5:17).

The religious leaders sought to corner and discount Jesus’ entire mission (John 8:5–6). If Jesus would not stone the adulterer, then he must be a law-breaker — and Evans comes right out and says it.

In his commentary on the Gospel of John, D. A. Carson suggests that when Jesus says, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7), he was specifically referencing the sin of adultery in the accusing men themselves! The men bringing the accusation were also adulterers. “When it comes to sexual sins, the woman was much more likely to be in legal and social jeopardy than her paramour,” Carson writes. “The man could lead a ‘respectable’ life while masking the same sexual sins with a knowing wink. Jesus’ simple condition, without calling into question the Mosaic code, cuts through the double standard and drives hard to reach the conscience.”

In this story Jesus is not breaking the law or shrugging off the Old Testament law. Rather, Jesus is calling these men out on their double-standard, thinking the law applied more to adulterous woman than to adulterous men.

It is through the high standards of the Old Testament law that we see the beauty of our Savior shine, not in his ignoring of the law, but in his fulfillment of it, not in lessening of the holy demands of God, but in seeing them in all their divine righteousness.

Take these few examples:

In Leviticus 1:9, the offering of a whole sacrifice to God prefigures Christ’s giving of his whole self (Hebrews 10:5–14).
In Leviticus 6:13, the unceasing flame of the altar reveals the insufficiency of repeated sacrifices in contrast to the sufficiency of Christ’s once for all sacrifice (Hebrews 10:1–10).
In Leviticus 11:45, separation from uncleanness symbolizes separation from sin in order to be intimate with God. It prefigures Christ’s work bringing holiness (Hebrews 7:26, 10:16).
In Leviticus 18:5, we read that God requires perfect obedience that can only be found in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:21). Sinners like us cannot keep the law (Romans 10:5, Galatians 3:12–14).

These few brief references barely scratch the surface for the number of references and parallels to Christ’s coming and sacrifice found in the Old Testament.

And so, yes, women can look to the Old Testament law passages to be reminded of God's holiness in texts like Leviticus 15:19–33. These texts may make women uneasy, but they also remind us that God is holy and majestic. He is separate from all sin — male and female. His ways are not our ways; they are perfect in every way, and we are hopeless without a perfect Substitute.

In passages like Leviticus 15:19–33, women today are reminded that “regulations for the body” were imposed only “until the time of reformation” (Hebrews 9:10). That is, the Old Testament purification codes point to the arrival of Christ, the “high priest of the good things that have come” (Hebrews 9:11).

Any woman who practices purity regulations with her body is revealing her theology. It is a sad missing of how our Savior fulfills these specific regulations in his substitutionary death. It is tragically easy for all of us to minimize the significance of our sinless Savior’s life, death and resurrection from the dead.

The gospel reminds us that the world is fallen and sinful. Men sin against women. Women sin against men. Women sin against women. Women are not innocent, but sinners. Male and female, we all are each part of the problem. When we read of sin in the Old Testament, we are reminded of the sin that resides in our own hearts.

But the gospel reminds us that we can look at the Old Testament law without horror or terror. There in the purity codes we see a glimpse of the beauty and sufficiency of our Savior. We see the law that he came to fulfill. And in him we are saved from the greatest terror of all — an eternity separated from God.

And yet when the gospel is clouded, things go terribly wrong in our theology. Unless the veil is lifted (2 Corinthians 3:12–18), we cannot make sense of the Old Testament law in God’s redemptive plan. We cannot understand the hope and joy of biblical womanhood. And biblical womanhood, divorced from the gospel, becomes a very dangerous thing.

Brothers, We Are Not Professors

It has been said by one great Reformed theologian that we are living in the most anti-intellectual age in the church’s history. We are the TV generation, making way for the Internet generation. Images tickle our eyes, and sound-bites massage our brains. We are, compared to our Puritan fathers, ignorant shepherds leading sensate sheep in a dry and dusty land. Surely what we need then is more thought, more scholarship, more earnest hours spent pouring over the ancients in our studies. Right?

We are worldly when we, like the world around us, give ourselves to an entertainment mentality, when we amuse ourselves to death. We are still worldly, however, when we rightly reject the eye candy and froth of pop culture and then conclude that our problems are intellectual, and our solutions more learning. It was the enlightenment, not the Light of the World, that gave us education as its high and holy sacrament. What Jesus calls us to is to repent and believe the gospel. It is more important to us and our sheep that we would learn to believe more, than that we would find more to believe.

That means first that when we prepare to serve in the ministry, we have to prepare to serve in the ministry. Our seminaries, if we must have them, should more reflect a training hospital than a university. Divinity is not a body of knowledge to be mastered like geology. The Bible is not a book to be dissected like Moby Dick. We go there, if we must go there, not to study the Word, but to begin to learn to have the Word study us. We go to pursue not advanced degrees but the fruit of the Spirit. We go to lose our reputations, not to gain them. We go not to be thought wise, but to learn what fools we are.

That means next that when we are called to the ministry, that we minister. Our pulpits, sadly, are filled with men who started as seminarians eager to shepherd a flock. There they were introduced to a dynamic, likely godly professor, and suddenly the student determines he will pursue still more degrees, that he might follow in the footsteps of his hero. As seminary comes to a close growing debts, a growing family, and a growing urge to go and teach derail the plan to become a professor. Instead the young pastor determines to take a church that his flock can become his student body, and His Body, a tiny little seminary. He will lecture then during Sunday School, and regale them through each sermon. The Shepherd, however, calls us to feed His Sheep. We are not to give our wisdom, our insights, the fruits of our scholarship. Rather, like Paul before us, we serve up our weakness, our frailty, our need. That’s how the Word breaks through, where the power comes from.

Brothers, your flock may need some more information. What they need more, however, is someone to lead them, to show them the Way. They need to see you repenting. They need to see you wrestling with your sins. They need to see you preaching the gospel to yourself, not because you like the sound of your voice, but because you hate the sin that yet remains, and you need grace. They need to see you rejoicing in the fullness of His promises, and mourning both sin and its fruit, the last enemy, death.

No man needs advanced degrees, and arcane letters after his name in order to follow Jesus. Which means that no man needs these things to lead others in following Jesus. If you follow Him, they will follow you. If, however, you merely tickle their brains, they will soon go off in pursuit of someone who seems smarter than you. If they are taught to hear your voice, they won’t discern the voice of the Master.

When our days of ministry come to an end, our labors will either be dust, or they will be dust. No matter how many downloads our wisdom garners, no matter how many journals publish our insights, these will all one day decay. Our scholars’ hoods and robes, pulpits and libraries will become mere chaff.  If, however, we spend our days as shepherds, pasturing the flock, our labors will last forever. For we minister to dust, to men into whom the Spirit breathed twice. We minister to dust that is, through faithful, pastoral preaching, being burnished into the image of the Pearl of Great Price. Brothers, we are not doctors, but the sick, not scholars but fools. Let us then be fools for Christ. Preach.

Don’t Hide God’s Word from the Little Ones

It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin. –Luke 17:2

It may long be remembered as the night Sinclair Ferguson went rogue.

The date was June 28, 2009. During the congregational singing, he felt an unusually strong impression to preach something altogether different — both text and topic — from the manuscript he was holding in his hand for the exposition he had prepared on Romans 6:6–14.

Here’s how he explained himself on the fly in abandoning the announced topic:

There are rare occasions when during the course of a service there is such an impression made upon one’s spirit and soul that one feels compelled to preach on something different from what has been announced. And feeling that compulsion earlier on in the service — those of you who were sitting in the gallery wondering why at points I was scribbling on a piece of paper will now realize that what I was doing was earnestly praying that if the Lord wanted me to preach on something different tonight he would at least give me an outline.

And provide an outline God indeed did. Instead of Romans 6, Ferguson took up 2 Timothy 3:14–15 and preached earnestly that his hearers not withhold the Scriptures from the little ones. Here’s the outline:

1. The value of children knowing the Scriptures from their infancy?
2. The vital importance of parental faithfulness in difficult circumstances?
3. The possibility of great usefulness for the most ordinary of Christians?
4. The wonder of what our children can become, despite all the obstacles

In particular, the point on which Ferguson wanted to challenge his congregation was this: “What kind of instrument are you? I’m thinking particularly this evening about what kind of instrument are you in relationship to young people?”

This is an especially sobering warning from the veteran pastor to a young father like myself: “If you hide the Scriptures from your children, it may be better that a millstone be hung around your neck and you be cast into the midst of the sea than that you should ever imagine that you're behaving like a Christian parent.”

The sermon is well worth the listen for young Christian parents — and everyone else. The preaching is raw and powerful — and Ferguson’s rich Scottish accent is icing on the cake.

Don’t Miss the Subtle, Ironic Poetry of God

When it comes to God, you must always keep your eyes open. If you don’t pay attention you’ll miss jaw-dropping glory.

Take the book of Esther, for example. If you’re not careful, you’ll only see a Hollywood-like story of a beautiful young orphan girl who against all odds becomes queen of Persia and, with a little help, recognizes her moment of destiny and courageously faces down a Persian Hitler.

And you would miss the real story.

The real story is not Esther’s inspiring courage or her beauty or Mordecai’s sage wisdom. This story is about what’s really going on behind the machinations of power.

Haman thinks he’s taking super-sized revenge on Mordecai for dissing him by orchestrating a kingdom-wide ethnic cleansing of the Jews. But all he really is is just the devil’s pawn.

Ahasuerus thinks he’s searching for a royal goddess-queen by culling “all the beautiful young virgins” (Esther 2:3) from the 127 provinces in his kingdom and hosting the world’s largest personal beauty contest. He has no clue that he’s God’s pawn to checkmate the devil. Oh, and, by the way, after all that work he “chooses” a Jewish orphan who lives down the street.

The book of Esther is the subtle, ironic living poetry of God where he chooses “what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (1 Corinthians 1:27) and shouts his total sovereignty over cosmic powers (Ephesians 6:12), raging nations (Psalm 2:1), and the course of human lives without ever mentioning himself once. Nor the devil.

One thing I love about John Piper is that he doesn’t miss the poetry and he helps us see it too. In fact, it stirs the poet in him, which is why he wrote a narrative poem-story based on the book of Esther, now published by Crossway and beautifully illustrated by Glenn Harrington. It has two movements. In the first, 12 year-old Esther asks her uncle, Mordecai, how she came to be an orphan. In the second, 35 year-old Esther tells her own child how she came to be queen.

Often we are helped to see glory by looking at biblical truth through someone else’s lenses. We see different facets by looking from different perspectives. That’s the value of this book. It will help you see more than you might on your own.

And it will remind you to keep your eyes open as you watch God’s living poetry going on around you right now. The real story is often not what is most visible.

 

Give the Priceless Gift of Corrective Lenses

Jesus died for me. What a treasure I must be!

I can think of a number of times over the years when I’ve heard people say something like this. And typically they were people I knew read the Bible frequently. But this idea isn’t in the Bible. Jesus didn’t die to purchase treasures. He died to ransom (Mark 10:45) enemies (Romans 5:10). We’re not the Pearl of Great Price (Matthew 13:46); Jesus is. So where did they get this idea from?

Faulty lenses.

Somewhere along the way their subjective experience and/or bad teaching caused them to look at the cross, see Jesus hanging on the cursed tree, and see a statement of their self-worth rather than amazing grace that saves wretches.

Lenses are extraordinarily powerful things. We interpret reality depending on the way we see it. If something is wrong with our seeing — our lenses — we won’t see reality. We will see a distortion.

And this is far more important when it comes to spiritual sight than it is with physical sight. Here’s how Jesus said it:

Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness. Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness. (Luke 11:34–35)

The degree to which our spiritual eyes are bad is the degree to which our understanding is dark.

The truth is we all have bad eyes that need corrective lenses to let more light in. And the corrective lenses that Jesus provides us with are his Word and the gift of teaching in the church (Ephesians 4:11). When teachers “rightly [handle] the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15), people receive corrected sight and their “eyes” become more healthy and their soul more full of light.

And there is nothing more important for people to see clearly than why Jesus came to die. That’s why John Piper wrote the book, Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die. At 122 pages and only two pages per chapter, this is a great book to give away. It’s something people will read. And if you want to give a lot away, we’ll let you have them by the case (48 copies) for $1.65 per copy.

Right handling of Jesus’s word is about the greatest gift we can give anyone else. Because through it they may receive a healthy eye and lighted soul.